Up Against It - M. J. Locke [124]
Here, today, the stink of humanity surrounded Jane again. But the store and people smells were underlain with a staleness, a hint of human excrescence, rotting food, machine oils, and mold. The humidity was higher than normal, too. She could tell by the damp feel of the air on her face and in her lungs, by the way the wisps of her hair, which ordinarily hung straight and heavy in this high-gee place, coiled stubbornly across her cheeks and forehead.
The smell was death, hanging patiently around. Waiting for just one more thing to go wrong, that could not be fixed in time.
In truth, she should be grateful to Benavidez. The last twelve years that she had run Phocaea’s systems, and in particular the last four days, they had lurched and dodged from one near-catastrophe to another. However gleeful her fellow citizens were, however certain they were that their problem was solved—and they were all around her now, celebrating at the news that the ice would soon be delivered—she knew better. She knew how easily things might have gone horribly wrong many times in the past, if the stars had been aligned and one single thing had changed. And she remembered Vesta. The next crisis might well be the last. She was relieved, when it came down to it, that she would not be the one making the decisions this time.
After a while the stares got to be too much. After a third passerby in a block slammed into her, nearly knocking her over, Jane ducked down a narrow walkway, through a semi-private atrium into a narrow alley. Several bug-sized news-mites flanked her along the carefully flawed brick walls of this less inhabited alleyway. A mote cloud thickened as it drifted toward her. She had almost certainly been breathing some in—swallowed them, even. Maybe Downside viewers would get a good look at her lungs, her bloodstream, her stomach lining.
She knew she was being irrational; they transmitted their signals by settling onto receptors set into the intake ducts. Anything she inhaled would simply be broken down by her normal body defenses just as dust, molds, and pollens were. It was silly to get bent about one product of bug-tech, and not everything. Assembler traces were everywhere: in their food, in their water, on every surface. If she had not experienced an allergic reaction by now, she probably never would. She leaned against the wall, breathing deeply, collecting her calm.
Only two more days of this torment and then she would be free, relatively anonymous—she hoped—aboard the Martian cruiser Sisyphus. Nevertheless, she felt a powerful need to fumigate.
She turned the corner, and emerged onto a less populated avenue. By law, the reporters’ mites couldn’t follow her into the law office, though they clustered in the entryway and would no doubt be there when she emerged. The “Stroider”-motes on the other hand could enter at least the lobby with her, and did.
Sarah was ready to see her as soon as she arrived but Jane deferred, and waited in the lobby until the offline window. At precisely eleven, the motes began to dissipate. She gave it about sixty seconds, and then ran a signal tracer to verify that mote density had dropped to a sufficiently low level to assure privacy. The area was clean.
Sarah stood as Jane entered. She was tall and lanky, nearly four decimeters taller than Jane, also in her middle years. Her hair was auburn streaked with white, and her cheeks were as ruddy with cold as the day they two had first met. Her face creased into a smile, and she came to take Jane’s hand. Old, dear friend.
“It’s nice to have a little privacy.” Jane sank gratefully onto her couch. She felt safe for the first time in days.
Sarah offered her sandwiches. Jane put her hand in her pocket, remembering the pills, but she couldn’t bear to put anything in her stomach just now. Later. She pushed the sandwiches aside.
“Those goddamn motes. I thought